Friday, May 8, 2015

The Long Quest

Sir Galahad - 'The Quest for the Holy Grail' by Arthur Hughes (1832-1915). '"[King Arthur’s knights] agreed that all would go on this quest, but…they thought it would be a disgrace...to go forth in a group…so each entered the forest...at a point that he, himself, had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no path.”...If there is a path, it is someone else’s path, and you are not on the adventure.' ~ Joseph Campbell

The Long Quest

A lonely grieving
God has called us these odd days
to take up the task
and spin crazy yarns
as we traverse rocky shores,
take up the long quest,
take the shape required
to continue no matter
what, no matter what.

Perhaps somewhere we
will embrace. Until that day
we will pray and pray.

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The View From The Northern Wall

Some years ago my poetry took on a mythic flavor and I became a character in my own poems, a mage, "the man of the Northern Wall". This apellation is not completely fictional. My middle name is Noordwal, a Dutch term for north wall, though in current Dutch it mainly means north bank as in riverbank. I was told that an ancestor, a Portugese Jew escaping the Inquisition, settled in a small Dutch town and took this name from where he settled, near the north wall of the town. I have thought for a long time that -wal meant wall, think my mother told me that. A linguist might say that my usage is no longer common, is an older usage, but then the Inquisition happened in Portugal a few centuries ago, right around the time the Moors lost control of the Iberian Peninsula and the Jews lost the modest protection given them by Islam. Now I write as this mage, my poetry persona.